The statements in this section may be useful background to understanding the invention, but may not constitute prior art.
In the field of electronic commerce (e-commerce), there are interactive websites that assist users in creating media-based projects such as photo-books, photo-calendars, photo-cards, and photo-invitations. Such interactive websites allow users to upload photos and interact with the websites to create photo-based projects that are customized to user's preferences. A media-based project creation utilizes photos, videos, audio-videos, pictures, and/or text. As used herein, the phrase “photobook” shall be synonymous with any type of media-based product or project. Prior art photo-based project web sites come with various drawbacks.
A common drawback with conventional photo-based project websites is the amount of time required by users (Internet users or customers) to create a photo-based project. Users must often participate in a variety of functions and processes in order to complete a photo-based project. For example, users usually must sort through the photos they desire to upload, remove the photos that are not adequate or properly focused, choose the photos to be uploaded, group photos together by topic or location, order the photos by chronological order, and crop or focus photos on the relevant portions of said photos. Performing the above processes can take undue time and labor. Further, there are corrections and modifications that users must make to photos before the photos can be used in a photo-based project. For example, users often must correctly orient photos (landscape or portrait view), perform color corrections on photos, remove red-eye from the eyes of photo subjects, and correct photos for brightness or contrast. All of the corrections and modifications mentioned above require that the users additionally open a second program or application in a user device such as a personal computer, choose the photos to be corrected or modified, perform corrections or modifications, and then save the modified photos before using them in the project. Again, performing the corrections and modifications mentioned above may require additional skills, and can be time consuming, labor intensive, and create displeasure for users. As a result, many users that log-on to prior art photo-based project websites often discontinue the process, without completing a purchase transaction of the photo-book.
Prior art products for a photobook creation are often based on a theme or stylistic parameter. However, they often do not have any bearing on the inter-relationship of layouts, themes and designs so applied, and on how relevant photos are grouped together in the project. Prior art products also lack photo feature extraction, object detection, and image analysis to intelligently customize the photobook for the user.
Prior art products lack a layering of photos based on photo feature extraction, object detection, and image analysis. With such shortcomings in the prior art, an Internet user or customer may need to spend undue time and labor in manually customizing layouts, colors, themes, stylistic parameters, and captions of photos and text to be able to finally design and print-by-order a satisfactory photobook. Undue time and labor in such a manual customization is a barrier to decide on an online purchase of a photobook. Such a barrier is also known as a “friction point.” Such barriers or friction points are further compounded by unfriendly graphical user interface (GUI) of prior art products and photo editing software, and result in additional inefficiencies and errors in printing a media-based product, such as a photobook. Such friction points result in loss of potential customers before the customers reach to the point where they can order the media-based product for printing. A significant fraction of potential customers are lost in such friction points.
Because of the aforementioned issues in customizing and printing a photobook through a web application or electronic commerce application, customer or user experience in creating and ordering a photobook is inefficient.
With respect to the physical books themselves, prior art books may have a photo printed on a protective book jacket of the book or on a hardcover of the book itself. For example, school textbooks need to withstand heavy use by students and may have a textbook cover photo concerning the textbook subject that is printed as an integral part of the protective plastic wrapping of the textbook cover. Similarly, a protective clear plastic wrap may be used over a photo on a photobook cover. In these cases, there is a printing of a photographic image directly on the protective cover material or the jacket of the book cover and as a result the printed photographic image contributes nothing to the thickness of the protective cover material or to the thickness of the book jacket.
Personalized photo albums and photobooks are generally used to hold photographs printed on photographic paper and the cover of the album or book may display a photograph printed on photographic paper as well. A personalized photograph may be inserted underneath a plastic window on top of the photobook cover or may be inserted underneath a border frame on top of the book cover. In some cases, the personalized photograph is inserted underneath a plastic window bordered by a frame on the top of the photobook cover. If a photograph is attached to a photobook cover without a protective covering, then an object may catch an edge of the photograph and initiate a sudden detachment or gradual peeling of the photograph from the cover of the photobook cover. The present inventors have recognized that it would be an advancement in the state of the art to address these and other problems with prior art methods for attaching photographs to photo albums, photobooks, and the like.
It is against this background that the various embodiments of the present invention were developed.